Sophocles deperditus. Per una storia delle sillogi dei frammenti sofoclei tra XVI e XVII secolo

The study relates to the corpus of Sophoclean fragments, concentrating on the history of its formation between the last twenty five years of the 'Quattrocento' and the XVII century on its way to become a legitimate dominion of scholarly research. The typological diversity of both the works investigated and their characteristics urges the researcher to reflect also upon the specific cultural implications arising from the study of literary fragments within the above-mentioned chronological limits. The task of collecting fragments reveals a wide array of approaches, from both a diachronic and synchronic point of view, and the works taken into examination give evidence for the complexity of this field of classical studies. The interest into Sophoclean fragments since the advent of printing is probably larger than the lack of a specific bibliography might suggest. In order to fully appreciate this interest, an analysis of literary fragments’ textual features is needed: even in this period deperdita are quoted for the same reasons that often lead to them being extracted from their original context in ancient times. Before the first ‘polymathic’ editions of the XVII century – e.g. like those of I. Casaubon (who wrote the very first catalogus of all Sophoclean dramas), I. Meursius, and T. Gataker – Sophoclean fragments were collected according to an established ‘gnomological’ tradition. An early exception to this rule is represented by the Italian humanist Politian, whose quotations from Sophoclean fragments in the Miscellanea and in some of his Commentaries contribute to his project of collecting a vast encyclopedia on the ancient world. More concerned in Sophoclean poetry’s pedagogical and moral value appears to be Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose Adagiorum chiliades offer a quite large number of quotations from the tragedian’s deperdita, which amount to about one third of the overall Sophoclean quotations. Regarding the XVII century, the corpus is dealt with according to three different approaches: an ‘ancient’ one, depending on the aforementioned gnomological tradition, rooted in Stobaeus’s Anthologium and its Themenenteilung of fragmentary texts; a polymathic one, far from gnomic concerns in its aiming to modern ecdotic criteria such as impartiality and completeness; a third approach, often overlooked, conceiving fragments as a mean for the XVII century’s learned to enlarge his knowledge of the ancient world on an historical-antiquarian point of view, pursuing an ideal totius antiquitatis cognitio. Particularly relevant and a common feature among these different approaches, at least as far as the corpus of Sophoclean fragments is concerned, is the copious amount of conjectures and hermeneutic solutions made in this century and then printed – though not always correctly documented and attributed – in modern editions’ critical apparatus, as confirmation of an early, lively philological attention to fragments.